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Her Last Walk Home. Patricia Gibney

Every time I read a book in this series I know it’s going to be frighteningly realistic. The crimes, the characters, the lot, all add up to stories that have me hooked, and this one is no exception.

Walking home at night you should be safe, but everyone knows it’s increasingly risky. So when one young woman doesn’t complete the journey and is found dead, on a bit of grass, a murder investigation is got underway.

As a mother, with children about the same age, Detective Lottie Parker is always going to give the investigation her all, she always does.

The team soon identify the girl and find that she had been on an innocent date the night she disappeared.

Or at least on the face of it she had.

When another girl is found dead in similar circumstances the victims begin to look a little less “innocent”

Two things you are Guaranteed with Patricia Gibney books. Firstly they are written from the heart. Every emotion, of every character is carefully crafted and plays out wonderfully on the pages. Secondly the plot is always original, surprising, and most importantly realistic.

I can’t write too much about the plot, the victims, and the person, or persons responsible for the crimes without including huge spoilers.

In a vague way I will say that the young women that are killed are just being young women, and that nobody deserves to be murdered.

But in modern society what is innocent.

It’s a question this book ponders. When does moralistically wrong become illegally wrong.

When does a person cross the line from having fun, to needing the fruits of having fun.

At what point does the empathy of the reader, or the bystander, become negatively judgmental, a luxury a Police Investigator cannot afford to let cloud their investigation.

All of these things Patricia Gibney handles better than most writers.

Lottie Parker has had it rough, her family have put her through the wringer, but no matter what she is still a supportive mother, grandmother, and daughter, faced with all the trials and tribulations of being the “responsible adult” to all of the generations.

The Parker family story is central to these books and although this, and the others, could be read as a standalone, I would highly recommend reading the series to get the full impact.

Print length: 500 pages. Publisher: Bookouture. Audiobook length: 13 hours. Narrator: Michele Moran

Body Language, Life Sentence, Case Sensitive and Dead Fall by A.K Turner

I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a new series this much.

One of the best things about reading is finding a new author with an established series, and binge reading it.

That’s exactly what happened to me with this series. I picked up Body Language just over a week ago and have just put down Dead Fall having read all four books.

There are two main characters in these books Cassie Raven and Phyllida Flyte, and they couldn’t be more at opposite ends of the social scale.

Cassie is a runaway school drop out who once lived, and took class A drugs, in squats around Camden Town, whilst embracing the Goth life style. Now she’s still a Goth, but she’s got herself together, and in her mid twenties she’s working as a Senior Morgue Technician, still in Camden Town.

Phyllida is a very prim-and-proper, Police Detective, who is suffering the culture shock of moving from a relatively safe shire constabulary to a high pressure, machismo fuelled , Major Crimes department in Londons Met.

Cassie doesn’t look the part, with her Goth haircut, tattoos and piercings but she’s good at her job.

She thinks the dead sometimes talk to her, but what is actually happening is her intuition is kicking in. She’s seen something on the body that isn’t right, or contradicts the initial findings, or the Police’s hypothesis of how a person has died.

She knows that instinct has highlighted something, and she is like a dog with a bone until she’s worked out what it is.

Meanwhile Phyllida battles the male dominated rough talking London Officers, she is not just there to make their tea, and although often given the menial tasks, her detective work soon gets to be seen for what it is, brilliant.

When Phyllida first encounters Cassie it’s fair to say she doesn’t like her, and it’s also fair to say the feeling is mutual. These two are everything the other doesn’t like in a person.

But inevitably the trust starts to build, they both recognise each others strengths and intuitions on a professional basis, but find each other immensely irritating on a personal level.

The series follows both of their personal lives, and as both of them have great back stories, and become reluctant friends , it makes great reading.

Each book contains one main crime, starting with a sudden or suspicious death. As in real life the investigation can be complex and convoluted, but it always stays well within the realms of possibilities.

Body Language.

When somebody Cassie knows ends up in her morgue she’s not happy with the initial findings. The Police say Accidental Death, a hypothesis the pathologist is, at first happy to support.

But Cassie’s intuition says different and she goes to great lengths to prove the death was anything but an accident.

The one person who listens to her is the “stuck-up, posh” new Police woman.

Life Sentence

Having learned something about her family, that she was blissfully unaware of ( It’s difficult to go deeper without spoiling book 1) Cassie tries to make right a wrong which has affected her family for as long as she can remember. Her unlikely ally, as this will also bring the police into disrepute is Phyllida, can Miss Strait-Laced be convinced to break the rules with the reputation of her colleagues on the line.

Case Sensitive

This time it’s Phyllida’s turn to trust her instincts. When a body turns up floating in a canal she is sure she recognises him. It’s her that doesn’t like the initial Post Mortem, and asks Cassie if her intuition had kicked in.

This time what they uncover will test both of their resolves, physically and moralistically, but will both of them come out unscathed.

Dead Fall

When a promising young singer ends up on Cassie’s slab everybody thinks it’s a tragic suicide.

Cassie knew her before she became famous and had gone to school with her.

Reflecting the life and death of one of Camdens other tragic pop stars this girl had a roller coaster life of drugs and fame, even if it was very short lived.

Cassie spots wounds on the body that she doesn’t think are consistent with her jumping from her high rise flat.

Things have moved on in Phyllida’s world ( again I can’t go into that without spoiling book 3) but when Cassie is proven right, and that this is not a suicide, Phyllida is tasked to look at how the initial police investigation got things so wrong

The series needs reading in order. The running story forms the backbone of the series and Cassie and Phyllida’s needs reading in chronological order.

Having read 4 books in 10 days I now have to join the rest of the world in waiting for book 5. And to say I’m excited to see where the series goes next is an understatement.

Stunning.

My Daughter’s Revenge

Natali Simmonds

Two women, well one woman and a youth.

One mother and her daughter, at opposite ends of sexual activity scale.

The mother, Jules, in her forties, she wants to be sexually active but her husband has shown no interest in sex for a while.

The daughter, Leah, sixteen, desperate to experience sex.

Leah lies to her parents and hooks up with a young man at a music festival.

Jules resorts to an anonymous app which allows her to talk to men nearby.

At first Jules is getting cheap thrills from the site. Having uploaded a boudoir type photo of her from behind she soon starts to attract the attention.

The thrill soon changes to loathing as the majority of the responders to her post are just perverts or downright rude.

But there is one person that doesn’t seem that bad. Could she……should she???

Meanwhile Leah is on her own track to a calamity. She lied about her age when she hooked up with the cannabis smoking festival goer, and that soon comes back to bite her.

With mother and daughter both on a collision course to emotional disasters is there any way to redeem themselves.

This is a twisting plot which at times seems to telegraph what is about to happen.

But just like real life, when bad decisions are made, things become anything but predictable.

I enjoyed the plot.

I enjoyed the characters.

At times I’ve criticised books for being too graphic, or using gratuitous sex or violence, this is definitely not the case in this book.

The scenes are well written, and where the sixteen year old is concerned it’s very empathetic.

This book treads a sensitive line but never oversteps the mark.

A good read.

Pages: 368. Publisher: Bookouture. Publishing date: 14th August 2024

Áróra Investigation Series

Lilja Sigurdardóttir

I’ve spent the last two weeks reading the first three books in this series, back-back.

Set in Iceland with a main protagonist who is half British, half Icelandic, the story in each book is brilliant, as is the running story which continues in the background of the second two, having being the main story in the first.

Áróra is a financial private investigator who specialises in identifying where people hide money, whether it’s for a messy divorce, or a corporate crime. Her favourite outcome to each case is to take her commission in cash and roll around in it, on her bed.

Cold as Hell

When her sister goes missing in Iceland her mother insists she goes to find her. Explaining to her mother that she is not that type of investigator hold no grounds with her mom, so she catches a FI light to meet a “relative” who is a Police Officer who has volunteered to help.

The Officer, Daniel, is only a distant relative, and that is by a marriage that has long ended in divorce, but they click, and start the hunt for her sister.

They start with the boyfriend. is an abusive bully who has beaten Ísafold on multiple occasions, but she keeps returning. Suspected of not only taking, but also dealing drugs Björn is the obvious suspect, but proving it is going to be difficult.

They are not the only one that has concerns about Björn and his treatment of Ísafold. And he is out for revenge, but does this help or hinder Áróra and Daniel’s investigation

It’s no spoiler to say that Ísafold is never found, and it’s Áróra’s hunt for her that continues through the other two books.

Red as Blood

Áróra is still on the island looking for her sister when an accountant she works for contacts her to tell her he needs help with a client in Iceland.

Entrepreneur Flosi has returned home to find his wife had been kidnapped. Told not to inform the police, but to arrange for a 2 million euro ransom to be paid in cash he has contacted his accountant in England.

The accountant wants Áróra to act as liaison and to fly to the U.K. to courier the cash.

Inevitably the police do get involved and it’s Daniel’s team lead the investigation.

Áróra however finds links to Russian mafia in Flosi’s businesses, he’s not the innocent entrepreneur, and the kidnapping isn’t all that it seems.

White as Snow

The story centres on people smuggling. When a container is found abandoned in Iceland with four dead bodies inside an investigation is launched.

There is one survivor, a Nigerian woman that had been living in France. At first she doesn’t know how she ended up in the container but the book contains her backstory in some of the chapters. As this unfolds so does the investigation in Icleland.

Again the Russian Mafia seems to be at the heart of everything.

Daniel has stepped back from leading the investigation, finding it harrowing, having found the survivor, but continues in a support role.

Áróra starts to follow the money, putting herself in more danger than she appreciates.

I read these books because I read a review of the 4th book which is due out later this year. I’m glad I did but now I find myself having to wait months for the next episode in what I’ve found to be an enthralling series.

Publisher: Orenda Books. Print lengths: 309, 315 and 319 pages.

Guilty Mothers. Angela Marsons

The series that just keeps on giving. I have led a far from sheltered life, but Angela Marsons has found a topic to base this story on that I was blissfully unaware of, and it’s stunning.

Kim Stone and her team are called to the scene of a murder. One of the worst types of crime, a young woman has apparently murdered her mother.

With the daughter locked up the team start to dig into their family relationships.

The only thing of note is that the daughter was a Child Beauty Pageant contestant and that mom might have been a bit pushy.

When another mother of a Beauty Pageant Contestant turns up dead it can’t be a coincidence, and as Stone thought she had the killer already locked up it comes as a bit of a surprise.

And so the journey into the world of Beauty Pageant begins.

The world inhabited by the contestants, and their families, comes as a big surprise to the down-to-earth Stone. The comparison of her early life can’t be ignored.

This is book twenty in the series, that’s one hell of a milestone.

You would think that this far into a series the author would be struggling to keep the reader hooked. This book proves just how wrong that would be.

The story is compelling, who knew that Pageants were a thing in the UK.

The fact that they do, and that there are bitchy, bullying, mothers living their life vicariously through their, sometimes unwilling, and often unhappy children, makes a fantastic backdrop to a murder story.

Stone and her team are always engaging and their back stories always have me hooked.

I love these books. The series is still my favourite. Book 20. Let’s hope for books 25, 30 and who knows how many more.

Pages: 362. Publisher: Bookouture. Audiobook: 8 hours 21 minutes. Narrator: Jan Cramer

The Confession Room. Lia Middleton

When a civilian sticks their nose into an ongoing Police Investigation it is a hinderance.

When that civilian starts to interfere in the investigation, and have an ongoing negative effect on it they become an annoyance.

When they start to withhold information they become a criminal

When that person is a recently retired Police Officer it’s inexcusable.

Or is it.

Emilia Haines is the ex cop. She’s a struggling Private Investigator. She’s also a victim.

Her sister was killed by a stalker. On the night she died she had repeatedly called Emilia who was to busy being a Police Detective to answer her calls. She knows she could have saved her.

The PTSD this brought on has seen her leave the job she loved.

The Confession Room is a website where people can anonymously make life confessions.

But when the site becomes the vehicle through which a killer targets people, before streaming their final confession and murder, things obviously take a serious turn.

Emilia has posted on the site, confessing the fact she thinks she could have saved her sister. But she’s also obsessing that some day, somebody will confess to her murder.

So when people are murdered in the Confession Room she starts nosing around the investigation.

Yes, she is the hinderance who graduates through to become criminally involved by withholding evidence. But that’s only the start.

Things get worse, much worse.

This story is a bit of a stretch. Lia Middleton lets Haines get away with too much. Not only in the fact that she wouldn’t have been able to get away with it in the real world, but also to the point of the reader losing any empathy they may have had with her.

But this isn’t a bad thing. There was no time in this book that I felt I knew what was coming.

And the ending certain wasn’t what I was expecting

That made for a really enjoyable read, full of twists and turns, and fast paced, every chapter captivated me.

Publisher: Penguin. Pages: 352. Audio Book: 9 hours 25 minutes. Narrator Rachael Stirling

The Two Deaths of Ruth Lyle

Nick Louth

When one of your favourite authors ends a great series, and you wonder what they are going to come up with next, this is the type of response you really want.

Detective Inspector Jan Talantire and her team work in a Major Investigation Team of Devon and Cornwall Police. What they face in this story is a unique and baffling crime.

Ruth Lyle was a 16 year old girl when she was killed on the alter of a church 50 years ago.

When a woman is killed in the same way, in the now converted church, on the anniversary it is the start of an investigation that will span half a century.

It’s not just the location and manner of death which are identical. The woman killed today has the same name as the original victim, the same date of birth, and her birth certificate.

As far as debuts for a new series goes this is second to none.

The crime is clever and left me intrigued up till the very last page.

Talentire is a great character. Nearly 40, newly single and struggling with trying to establish a life balance that would actually give her a chance on the dating scene.

She is driven as a detective, and doesn’t take any heed of pressures from above, or below, when she is on the right track.

The supporting characters of her team, especially the newly appointed digital expert Primrose, are going to be great to watch develop over the series.

But what really steals the show is the setting. Small town crime on the North Devon coast needs all the skills of those investigated in the big cities. Without overlapping CCTV, with sketchy mobile phone coverage, and with the infrastructure difficulties of rural policing, it is more old school than some of the stories set in the cities, and for me that makes it all the more readable.

Let’s hope this is the start of another brilliant series.

Publisher: Canelo Crime. Pages: 326. Publishing date: 2nd May 2024 Audiobook 10 hours 9 minutes narrated by Mandy Weston

Deaths Head

Michael Alexander McCarthy

I’m going to start this review with a quote from the book.

“He had been so engrossed in his grandfather’s journal that he read on into the late afternoon without stopping to eat or make himself a drink”

That s exactly what happened to me reading this book. I read, and read and read. This was as close as I’ve gotten to a one sitting read in a long time.

It transformed me back to reading one of my earliest favourite authors, Sven Hassel, and his stories of a band of German Soldiers during WWII.

No glamour, just the horrors of war. The conflict of the regular soldier carrying out orders of delusional, psychopathic, leaders and the gradual numbing of their own moral compasses until they fought as much for their own survival, as they did for the “greater cause”

So who is reading what journal.

David Strachan is a successful business man living in Singapore. He receives notice that his grandfather had passed away in Scotland, and as the next of kin he returns to oversee the clearing of the house and arrange the funeral.

What he finds is that the nice Polish Grandfather he knew was not the person he thought he was.

And Grandad has left a journal relating his early life on the Poland German border, and the fact that as Hitlers war machine was gearing up for war, he had joined the notorious SS.

The journal would have made a great standalone book on its own but wrapped up in the consequences of the effect it will have on Strachan, and what happens after he has finished the journal, this makes for a story which is a cut above.

The story contained in the journal reminded me a lot of the Sven Hassel books but also of the best war book I’ve ever read, The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. The parallels with this book are striking, especially the traumatic psychological effects the experiences of the young soldiers have on them.

A must read.

Published by Rogue Maille Publishing. Print length 395 pages

Every Move You Make C.L Taylor

Five people in a self help group, all of them the victim of a stalker.

At the very start of the book the group loses a member when their stalker murders them on their doorstep.

At the funeral the group are delivered a chilling message. In just over a week one of them will die.

The story is told from the remaining four members of the groups point of view.

They hatch a plan to find out who’s stalker delivered the message, who is the target, but can they trust each other.

With the book being written from the point of view of the four potential victims the concerns, and insecurities soon start to manifest themselves in one of them.

As those concerns appeared on the page it led me to change my hypothesis on who was the intended target, and even start to develop thoughts on if one of them was in fact the puppet master using the others fears to manipulate them.

But why would that be. If all of them are victims of stalking why would one of them go from victim to predator.

This is a cracking story.

The pace of the book is perfectly set. It had me hooked from the beginning and kept me enthralled all the way through.

I can’t remember how many times I changed my hypothesis, up until the point it became obvious, and even then I wasn’t completely convinced there wasn’t going to be a twist.

Publisher Avon. Pages 422. Audio book 10 hours 8 minutes

Jack’s Back and Unlawfully At Large Mark Romain

Books 2 and 3 of the DCI Jack Tyler series set in London at the turn of the 21st century

By setting the books around the millennium Mark Romain has given himself the ideal era for for a great Police Procedural series

Technology is moving forward at a pace, Forensic use of DNA is well advanced and in use.

The use of Mobile Phone technology for tracking criminals is in its infancy, as is the forensic recovery of data from mobiles.

CCTV is starting to cover more of the City but is nowhere near as all-encompassing as it is now, and the quality isn’t great.

The Police have recently been criticised over their handling of the Stephen Lawrence case and the ramifications ripple through officers day to day investigations.

The woke society is not yet in full swing and officers, rightly or wrongly, get away with stereotyping and, in some cases, forming unfounded opinions of people.

All of this allows Romain to write books about what many people class as “proper policing”. Using the skills of a detective, actually carrying out an investigation into a crime, doing the boot work.

But it also allows Tyler and his team to use the incoming technology. CCTV, ANPR, mobile phone tacking, in its earliest of forms.

Jack’s Back.

A sadistic killer is using Jack The Ripper for inspiration.

Killing prostitutes in the same area of Whitechapel as the Victorian killer, using the original Jack as a template, but he is also out for revenge, could this be his Achilles Heal

As good as Romain is in writing from the police point of view it is the insight into the mind of the perpetrator.

The parts written from the point of view of the killer is chilling enough, but there are some peripheral characters that brought goosebumps.

Prostitutes and pimps feature heavily in this story and are written in a way that brings them to life as well as the Police characters.

The violence and deprivation of the seedy side of life is portrayed graphically, but without being gratuitous.

In telling the story Romain takes the reader inside the mind of minor players, and some nasty gangsters. He shows us the vulnerability of the girls working the streets and introduces us to the desperation for drugs that sees most of these women selling themselves to strangers.

Most shockingly it also shows us the dangers they face.

Unlawfully at Large.

When a vicious gangster is helped to escape police custody Tyler’s team is assigned to the team hunting him, whilst Tyler takes a back seat to that teams DCI. That is until an unfortunate case of food poisoning see Tyler take over as the SIO.

The vicious gangster escapes from custody whilst he’s in hospital. Aided by a family member and an assortment of small time gang members, and a drug dependant prostitute the group leave a trail of destruction during their getaway.

The case is personal for Tyler and his team and they stretch the limits to try to arrest the group before the main man can make the ultimate escape across the channel.

Again this is a gritty story that doesn’t hold back on the shock factor. But what really impressed me in this book is the feelings and emotion described within some of the main characters.

The pure desperation and unhinged logic of the escaping gangster. The realisation by some of the group that he has become unhinged and that they are involved in something way over their heads.

The pure blissful ignorance of one of the gang as he seems to want a normal life, but doesn’t really seem to realise just how much trouble, and danger he’s in.

On the Police side Tyler and his team are pushing the hours to a ridiculous rate. What Romain doesn’t shy away from is the fact that bad decisions can be made when somebody is exhausted.

The Series so far.

I can’t praise this series highly enough. Reading is subjective and everyone has their own likes and dislikes. I know this series won’t be for everyone but for me it ticks all of my boxes.

It’s realistic, it’s set in an era when policing was coming to terms with new technology and the investigations were not over reliant on CCTV or DNA.

Each of these books can be read as a standalone but I’d really suggest reading the whole series in order.